'Coolest Mayor' in America Runs His Own Urban Renewal Program

By SUE HALPERN

Published: February 12, 2011

At the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado last July, John Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock, a small Pennsylvania town just up the river from Pittsburgh, was introduced by Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, as a man who demonstrates ''how ideas can change the world.''

Mr. Fetterman, 41, a tall white man with a shaved head, fibrous black beard and tattoos up one arm and down the other, was presenting a slide show about how art could bring social change to a town where one-third of the 2,671 residents, a majority of whom are African-American and female, live in poverty.

He projected pictures of old, bustling Braddock, which the steel business made until the middle of the 20th century and then unmade throughout the rest. The pictures showed a main street packed with shoppers, storefronts filled with wares. Then he turned to Braddock as it is today.

''We've lost 90 percent of our population and 90 percent of our buildings,'' he said. ''Ninety percent of our town is in a landfill. So we took a two-pronged approach. We created the first art gallery in the four-town region, with artists' studios. We did public art installations. And, I don't know if you consider it art, exactly, but I consider growing organic vegetables in the shadow of a steel mill an art, and that has attracted homesteading.''

Mr. Fetterman displayed a picture of a furniture store, which the nonprofit organization he founded had bought in 2009 for $15,000; an abandoned church, which is being turned into a community center; former building lots, which are now green spaces; an outdoor pizza oven, made with bricks from a demolished building; and a house belonging to two of the homesteaders who have moved to Braddock from ''all over the country.''

''They bought this house for $4,300,'' Mr. Fetterman told the crowd, ''and put in a lot of sweat equity and now it looks like something you'd see in a magazine.''

The audience was enchanted. Here was a guy in biker boots bringing an educated, upper-income ethos -- organic produce, art installations, an outdoor bread oven -- to the disenfranchised.

''What was Braddock like before we took office?'' he continued. ''Braddock was a notorious community that was steeped in violence. But as of -- knock on wood -- today, we are now 27 months without a homicide.'' The audience began to clap and did not stop for a long time.

John Fetterman has become the face of Rust Belt renewal. He was dubbed America's ''coolest mayor'' by the British newspaper The Guardian and the ''Mayor of Hell'' by Rolling Stone magazine. The Atlantic magazine put him in its ''Brave New Thinkers'' issue of 2009. He has appeared on television shows on networks as various as PBS, CNN and Comedy Central (''The Colbert Report'').

In contrast with urban planners caught up in political wrangling, budget constraints and bureaucratic shambling, Mr. Fetterman embraces a do-it-yourself esthetic and a tendency to put up his own money to move things along. He has turned a 13-block town into a sampling of urban renewal trends, including land banking (replacing vacant buildings with green space), urban agriculture, encouraging creative people to bring new energy to old places, ''greening'' the economy as a path out of poverty and embracing depopulation.

Thrust into the spotlight, Mr. Fetterman has become something of a folk hero, with his own Shepard Fairey block print -- the Fetterman mien with the word ''mayor'' underneath. This, the poster suggests, is what a mayor should be.

Urban decline has been around just about as long as there have been cities. But the degeneration of the American industrial heartland, because it cuts across a wide swath of the country and is as much about jobs as it is about habitation, has seemed both intractable and inevitable. Earlier efforts to address it involved razing whole neighborhoods and erecting big projects.

But in cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh and Youngstown, Ohio, as well as towns like Braddock, where urban blight was not just a matter of run-down neighborhoods but of manufacturing plants' packing up and moving away, even such radical solutions offered little hope. It is one thing to replace substandard housing stock, quite another to reinvent an economy.

John Fetterman showed up in Braddock in 2001. He had tried the family business, insurance, but it didn't take, and he ended up joining AmeriCorps, a domestic U.S. service organization modeled on the Peace Corps, and moving to Pittsburgh in the late 1990s. After a two-year interlude at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in Massachusetts studying education and social policy, Mr. Fetterman was hired to start a program for at-risk youths in Braddock, a town beset by violence.

Two years later, Mr. Fetterman bought the church that was part of his Aspen slide show. He squatted in the church for a while, then, entranced by the town's ''malignant beauty,'' bought the warehouse next door and turned it into a loft, topped by two remodeled shipping containers for additional living space. Four years after arriving in town, he ran for mayor.